Angry at a corrupt, coercive system of military conscription, or simply unwilling to fight, many Ukrainian men are paying their way past a ban on leaving their homeland, slipping into Moldova, Romania, Poland and Hungary.
By Gabriel Bejan, Oxana Bodnar, Claudia Ciobanu, Zsófia Fülöp, Sofie Kochmar and Valentina Nicolae-Gesellmann
Andriy paid the smugglers in cryptocurrency and received instructions via Telegram. But in the end it was a plain old ladder that got him over the border between his native Ukraine and the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria.
“I don’t know where we crossed the border because our phones were turned off,” the 22-year-old said from Germany, speaking on condition his real name not be used. Two men were waiting on the other side and passed him a ladder, marking the climax of his flight from Ukraine.
A student of Kyiv’s College of Communications when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Andriy had always hoped to continue his studies abroad.
He supported Ukraine’s resistance by working as a volunteer with refugees in the western city of Lviv and was part of the youth movement of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party, but had grown increasingly worried at the prospect of being called up to fight.
At the end of last year, Ukraine’s parliament began debating whether to cut the age of conscription from 27 to 25, a proposal that eventually became law the following April. All males between the ages of 18 and 60 were already prohibited from leaving the country and from January, all 18 to 25-year-olds will be obliged to undergo military training.
By February, Andriy felt like a noose was tightening around him, a feeling reinforced by claims on social media about forced conscription and violence by local recruitment centres known as TCKs.
“I began to understand I must run from Ukraine,” he said, speaking in English.
For this investigation, by BIRN in partnership with HotNews, eight Ukrainian men of or near recruitment age were interviewed over a period of several months. All of them fled their homeland with the help of smugglers to escape mobilisation. Andriy was one of them.
They spoke of hours of online research, of Telegram channels and mystery middlemen, of smugglers paid in cryptocurrency.
In Andriy’s case, it cost him $4,500 – $1,000 up front and the rest the moment he entered Transnistria, a mainly pro-Russian region of Moldova that broke away from the Chisinau government’s control in the early 1990s and where Russia has a military presence.
When it’s all over, those who flee face being denounced back home as traitors, pawns of Russia’s war propaganda machine. Indeed, a Ukrainian information security expert and former official in the Ministry of Information Policy said Russia was behind at least some of the Telegram channels and Facebook pages offering instructions on how to leave Ukraine to avoid being sent to fight.
“When you find such an advertisement on Facebook, behind it may be a real smuggler who really wants to make money, but it may also be someone from the Russian intelligence services, from Transnistria or even from Russia,” he told BIRN on condition of anonymity.
Russia’s goal, he said, is “to tell Ukrainian men, through Telegram channels and any other social media, that the process of mobilisation amounts to death”.
Interrogation by agents
Ukraine says that some 43,000 of its soldiers have been killed since February 2022. The West says Russia has lost far more, with Britain estimating that an average of 1,523 Russian soldiers are being killed or wounded every day.
Those determined not to be called up often turn to smugglers.
Andriy, who is from Kyiv, made his first attempt in late February, two years into a war that shows no sign of abating.
He and four other people were caught, however, by Ukrainian border police in the region of Odesa. They were kept overnight. “The next morning, they gave me back my phone, handed me a summons to the military enlistment office in Kyiv and told me that there would be a court case,” he said.
Andriy was fined 8,500 Ukrainian hryvnia, roughly 200 euros. But he didn’t stick around for enlistment. He called the smugglers, referred to locally as ‘organisers’. They told him to return to Odesa, a Black Sea port city in the southwestern corner of Ukraine near the border with Moldova.
The next day, Andriy received a location pin on Telegram and called a taxi to take him there. When he arrived, the driver told him to walk straight ahead. He reached the border with Transnistria, where the ladder was waiting. It didn’t take long before he and his group were intercepted again, this time by Transnistrian border guards.
Instructed to hand over his personal belongings and the password to his mobile phone, Andriy was placed in a cell he said was roughly 10 square metres in size. With as many as 20 other men already inside, it was standing room only. Andriy said they discussed the situation and compared the prices they had paid the smugglers.
Andriy spent the night in another police station, where he had more room, and the next day he was interrogated by agents he believes were members of the Russian intelligence service, the FSB.
“Nobody said directly that it was the FSB; they were called ‘investigators’, but they didn’t belong to the border guard,” Andriy said. He also noted the ‘clean’ Russian they spoke, which suggested they were from Russia itself, and the fact they wore civilian clothes, unlike all the other officials who were in uniform.
“They asked me who I am, where I come from, where I studied, where I lived, where my parents live, my education, my opinion about the situation in Ukraine, why I wanted to flee Ukraine.”
“They placed particular emphasis on questions about the Ukrainian armed forces, on whether I know anything about air defence systems, military technology or whether I know anyone in the military.”
Interrogation over, Andriy was released and picked up by the smugglers. They drove him to the central bus station in Transnistria’s main city, Tiraspol, and gave him money to buy a ticket to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. “The Transnistrian border officer checked my documents and gave them back,” he said. “The Moldovan officer didn’t check them.”
In Chisinau, Andriy was taken to a private, downtown apartment rented by the smugglers for those who had paid extra, “so that we could rest a bit”.
Crypto or cash
Andriy had done his homework, mostly on Telegram.
“I searched for providers of these services, their prices, chances of success and reviews,” he said. “I asked the same people with different accounts about the entire process of crossing the border, looking for inconsistencies and lies.”
He only came across one route: Odesa-Transnistria-Chisinau.
And he said he thinks there is only one organisation behind the smuggling. “I think it’s a mafia,” he said.
Andriy’s account fits with the findings of an official investigation by prosecutors in Moldova.
“Ukrainian citizens are contacting the organisers of illegal migration networks on specific Telegram channels,” the Office against Organised Crime and Special Cases in Chisinau told BIRN.
“Afterwards, they are paying in cryptocurrency, because it’s harder for investigators to track the money, or by cash. After paying they receive instructions, also on Telegram, about the itinerary for the crossing of the border and where they will meet the person who will take them to the border with the Republic of Moldova.”
The prosecution said it is investigating 120 separate cases of illegal border crossings by Ukrainian citizens between February 2022 and August 2024, and that 45 alleged smugglers had been taken to court in that period, both Ukrainian and Moldovan citizens, for smuggling some 60 Ukrainians into Moldova.
“Most of them are men capable of fighting, in the context of the ban they have on leaving Ukraine,” the Office against Organised Crime and Special Cases said. Classified as victims of organised illegal migration, most apply for asylum and do not face prosecution, it added.
Moldova’s Border Police Inspectorate said it has 41 criminal cases open involving border police officers accused of complicity in illegal migration between 2022 and 2024. Besides via Transnistria, the Inspectorate said Ukrainians also entered Moldova by swimming across the Dniester River; others, it said, try to enter hidden inside cars, buses or lorries, or using false IDs.
The fact that military-age males are fleeing the country is not just bad for Ukraine’s military effort. It’s bad PR too.
The authorities have sought to pin the blame on Russia, accusing Moscow of playing mind games with young Ukrainian men.
The former official of the Ministry of Information Policy said Russian-orchestrated Telegram channels were exaggerating the Ukrainian casualty figures and pretending to help people avoid the mobilisation patrols that comb Ukrainian cities for military-age males.
“The channels basically teach people how to avoid these patrols,” he said. “But it is not necessary for the Russians to know exactly where these patrols are. They even communicate fake locations. Ukrainian men can see sponsored pages on Facebook that claim to teach them how to exit the country legally. These pages also include links to specific Telegram channels”.
It’s on these channels, he said, that unidentified individuals supply information on the itinerary, the price, how to pay and where to go.
He said Ukrainian authorities had reported the Facebook pages to the social media site’s owner, Meta, for removal – but without success. Telegram, which was founded in Russia, never responds, the former official added.
‘The whole bus was illegal’
In Chisinau, Andriy bought a bus ticket to the city of Iasi, just over the border in eastern Romania.
At the border, he said, the driver asked the passengers, “Who’s illegal?”
“The whole bus was illegal,” Andriy said. “So we were dropped off, our passports were taken away, we went to the building of the Moldovan Border Guard Service, and there we were called by name, in groups, for interrogation.”
He said the atmosphere was tense, that the Moldovan border guard was angry and demanded he write in Russian. The guards asked how he had entered Moldova and checked his phone for the contacts of the smugglers. But Andriy’s ‘organisers’ had told him to delete their contacts and any trace of communication, and to lie about how he crossed the border.
“I told the Moldovan officers that I crossed the border in a random taxi, at a random time, between a Ukrainian village and a Moldovan one,” he said. He also told them he paid a villager $100 to drive him to Chisinau.
“It’s funny,” said Andriy. “A bus full of Ukrainians telling the same lie about crossing the border without intermediaries, about the taxi, the $100 and so on.”
“They know we have ‘organisers’,” he added, “but if they can’t find the contacts or messages they can’t do anything about it. They can just stamp your passport and send you on your way.”
Andriy crossed the border on a bus bound for the port city of Hamburg, northern Germany.
The bus went straight through Romania, but for some young Ukrainian men, Romania – not Moldova – is their first target. The choice can be fatal.
Between February 2022 and October 2024, according to Romanian border police, 25 Ukrainians died trying to cross the border between Ukraine and Romania. Fifteen of them drowned in the Tisza river; the rest died in falls or of hypothermia in the mountains of Maramures.
Mountain rescuers in Maramures said those who try to cross the mountains are rarely equipped for the unforgiving conditions.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, 18,300 Ukrainian citizens have crossed illegally over Romania’s northern border; that includes 10,000 in 2024, as of October 16. On surrendering to Romanian border police, they receive temporary protection and are free to go anywhere in the European Union.
Through the fields
Andriy’s bus reached the Hungarian border at night, when he was woken by the driver instructing the passengers to prepare their passports.
He crossed without question, entering eastern Hungary via Hajdu-Bihar.
Further north, in Nyirbator, social worker Eva Adoba said she had seen many Ukrainian men arrive through the surrounding fields, muddy and wet, sometimes without shoes. Nyirbator is about 80 kilometres from the border between Ukraine and Hungary. None of them want to stay, said Adoba, who works for an NGO helping migrants and refugees.
“I’ve never met a single Ukrainian man who wanted to stay in Hungary. They are on their way to Germany, Spain, Portugal, even Canada,” she said.
“When I tell them I am from Transcarpathia [western Ukraine] and I speak Ukrainian with them, they trust me more,” said Adoba.
“Sometimes they tell me that they came from Kharkiv, Mykolaiv or Odesa, and their journey lasted a couple of weeks or even months. Sometimes they must hide for weeks in Transcarpathian villages to attempt to cross the border. But sometimes they don’t want to say a word about their route. They are highly traumatised.”
“They are told to wear waterproof clothing and shoes two sizes smaller than their feet, so they don’t get stuck in the mud. Yet, I met men who lost all their belongings in waist-deep water, except for their phones and the money they were carrying around their necks.”
Ukrainians welcomed
According to EU data, as of the end of September 2024, EU member states had granted temporary protection to more than 4.1 million Ukrainians, just over 37,000 of them in Hungary.
The status, currently valid until March 2025 but almost certain to be extended, entitles Ukrainians to a residence permit and access to education, healthcare and employment.
Of the more than 37,000 in Hungary, 5,241 were men between the ages of 18 and 65, according to data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office.
The language barrier and general anti-immigration sentiment means Hungary is not the most attractive destination for Ukrainians, but the welcome they receive contrasts strongly with the abuse and rejection that frequently awaits migrants and refugees from Asia, Africa and the Middle East who cross Hungary’s southern border with Serbia.
“When men fleeing from Ukraine to Hungary meet the police or border guards, they are picked up, taken to an immigration office where they are given papers, dry clothes, food and water if necessary, and then they are free to go,” said Adoba.
Hungary even said this year it would consider Ukrainian passports that have expired during the war valid within Hungary when it comes to sorting out a person’s status and helping them find work. Hungary also offers very good road and rail links with western Europe.
An EU legal expert, who declined to be named, told BIRN: “Hungary, Poland and Romania abide by the rules and don’t distinguish between people fleeing Ukraine, even if they are men of military age.”
Neither the EU expert nor Adoba said they had ever heard of Ukrainians being ‘pushed back’ over the border.
Ukraine vows to ‘humanise’ conscription
Andriy’s bus ride to Germany took him through the Czech Republic, where he recalled paying $150 for the petrol with his Ukrainian bank card because he had been unable to withdraw money from an ATM to pay for the ticket.
In Germany, he applied for a temporary residence permit and signed up for language classes. He plans to enroll in university.
He is far from alone.
According to the Central Register of Foreigners, as of October 12 there were just over 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees in Germany. Around a million of them have residence permits, the right to work and apply for welfare benefits. Roughly 37 per cent of them are men, 260,000 of them of military age.
Andriy remains active on Telegram and TikTok, keeping in touch with his peers, discussing alleged abuses by Ukrainian authorities, and strategies for escape.
Thirty-one-year-old Sergey Khorolsky, a TikTok blogger, is one of the most vocal critics of Ukraine’s conscription strategy and the exit ban on men aged 18-60.
Having escaped through the Dniester river to Moldova, Khorolsky began organising protests in Berlin this autumn. Like-minded activists have sought to do the same in Dublin.
Of the latest demonstration on November 17, Khorolsky said: “This time, we wanted to draw attention to the fate of men who died after being detained by the recruitment commissions in Ukraine.”
“We held up their photos, so they are not forgotten.”
At roughly the same time, media affiliated with the Ukrainian defence ministry branded the protesters as Russian stooges, and urged Ukrainians not to take part.
But Khorolsky and other protesters in Berlin denied having anything to do with Russian intelligence agencies or of serving Russian interests. They all said they had given money to the Ukrainian war effort but criticised what they claimed was violence used by army recruiters.
Khorolsky said he had evidence that seven men had died while being forcibly conscripted by the Ukrainian military recruitment centres, the TCKs.
Media reports in Ukraine say three of the seven cases are under investigation.
Responding to widespread criticism of the TCKs’ tactics, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said in November that the government was working to “humanise the mobilisation process”.
Umerov told reporters he hoped the digitalisation of the recruitment system would minimise incidents in which men are picked up in the street and, in general, “help move away from these painful issues for the population”.
The defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Fake passes and ‘friendly’ guards
Konstantin [not his real name] follows Khorolsky on social media and shares his grievances.
“It took me three minutes to exit Ukraine into Poland, no questions asked,” said the 22-year-old.
He left in June this year.
“I didn’t even have to wait in line with the other people. When I was a few kilometres from the border, I received a call from the border guards, who explained which way I had to go. I drove into Poland in the lane used by diplomats.”
The deluxe treatment did not come cheap. Konstantin said he paid $12,000, a figure well out of reach for most Ukrainian men trying to leave.
As a professional sportsman, Konstantin said he had been making good money for years.
He also knew whom to pay: the head of a local NGO, who arranged a one-month pass for him to leave the country as a volunteer for the organisation ostensibly to work ‘in the interests’ of the Ukrainian army. A part of the fee was passed to ‘friendly’ border guards, who waved Konstantin through.
The one-month pass expired, but Konstantin never returned.
The newspapers might be full of stories about Ukrainians perishing in the Carpathian Mountains or swimming across the Tisza, but many more slip unnoticed into Poland having bribed their way to false papers.
“It’s the Ukrainian men that have enough money to pay a bribe that usually come to Poland,” said Jakub Ber, who spoke in September when he was working at the Centre for Eastern Studies, OSW, a Warsaw-based, state-funded think-tank, and is now an independent expert.
Geography plays a part, Ber said.
For the most part, the border region between Poland and Ukraine is flat, making it easy for border guards to spot anyone trying to cross illegally. That makes smuggling difficult. Any military-age man trying to cross must do so ‘legally’ – with a document obtained in Ukraine granting him a temporary pass to leave.
A number of other Ukrainians offered similar accounts. In Germany, a Ukrainian woman said she and her boyfriend had used their entire savings to pay $7,000 for a fake disability document that exempted him from the exit ban, allowing him to cross into Poland in late 2023.
The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they were told precisely when to cross, in order to encounter ‘friendly’ border guards. All the communication went through Telegram and they never met the intermediary in person.
“My boyfriend rode to the border in an informal ‘taxi’, the system we use here: it’s basically women making an income out of driving people to the border; they have nothing to do with illegal crossings,” said the woman, a 30-year-old IT worker. “But we had to give the licence plate number to our intermediary, so that he could pass it to the border guards.”
Like others who eventually fled, the woman said they had originally volunteered for the Ukrainian war effort, but became disillusioned by the sight of young men being sent into battle unprepared, having to buy their own gear. The man increasingly confined himself to their apartment, frightened at the prospect of being made to fight.
Konstantin too said that, in the beginning, he had travelled to Western Europe to buy prosthetic limbs for children wounded by Russian missiles and even a Starlink satellite for the army.
He did so by paying the same NGO $3,000 for a pass to get out. “It’s crazy,” he said. “You have to pay in order to volunteer.”
But he admitted, “Many of us also used those volunteering trips to get a break from the stress of living in a war-torn country”.
In autumn 2023, Konstantin received a health assessment from a state medical commission, believing he could avoid conscription on the grounds that he had heart problems and high blood pressure.
“Despite my medical issues, which are real and well-documented by doctors, the guy in the commission told me he will declare me fit to fight unless I pay him $20,000,” he said. Konstantin refused.
“In Ukraine, if you are rich, you can buy yourself a lifetime exemption from the army,” he said. “Completely healthy politicians turn out to be ‘unfit’ to serve, while thousands of normal men with health issues end up on the battlefield.”
Poland’s economic incentive to turn a blind eye
According to data from the Polish Interior Ministry, as of September this year over 167,000 Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 had received protection in Poland since February 2022.
Earlier this year, Ukraine suspended consular services for men abroad, as a way of forcing them to sign up to the military database. Poland, a staunch ally of Ukraine in the war against Russian invaders, declared its readiness to help Ukraine get men living abroad to return and join the fight.
“I think many Poles are outraged when they see Ukrainian men in hotels and cafes, and they hear how much effort we have to make to help Ukraine,” said Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosinian-Kamysz, in remarks that would have sent a chill down the spines of many Ukrainian men in Poland.
For years before the war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men had moved to Poland in search of work.
Despite the defence minister’s comments, Miroslaw Skorka, head of the Ukrainians’ Union in Poland, said Warsaw could ill afford to send them back.
“Those may be the statements of politicians, but employers’ associations in Poland are begging for workers,” said Skorka.
“The Polish labour market had no problem absorbing the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who came since the full-scale war started, and it needs more.”
The benefit to the Polish economy is clear.
In 2023, Bartosz Marczuk, the head of the Polish Development Fund, calculated that Ukrainian refugees would pay more into the state budget than Poland spent on aid for them by the end of that year. That’s a big reason not to make a fuss about military-age men avoiding the draft.
“Our authorities never say anything about it,” said independent Polish expert Ber. “This topic doesn’t exist in Polish public discourse.”